One of President Obama’s nominees to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Patricia A. Millett, is a trustee of a group that recently issued a statement calling the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case “a tragic miscarriage of justice.”

The statement from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, founded in 1963 to combat “inequities confronting African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities,” said the “deeply disappointing” outcome shows that “much more work needs to be done to stamp out the ugly face of racism that still prevails in America.” Millett, an attorney at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, has served on the group’s board of trustees since 2010.

The D.C. Circuit Court, to which President Obama appointed Millett on June 4, is commonly considered the second-highest court in the country and a launching pad to the Supreme Court. Current Supreme Court justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all sat on the D.C. Circuit.

Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court lawyer and former colleague of Millett’s at Akin Gump, describes her as “completely objective and non-ideological.”